problem isVisualWorks ifFalse: [Gentoo] 1
After posting about my problems getting Cincom Smalltalk to work on my Gentoo system, I recevied an impressive amount of help. Aside from my friend the committed Smalltalker, I also received help from Isaac Gouy (who was able to quickly demonstrate that Cincom worked just fine with glibc 2.4), and most impressively James Robertson, the product manager for Cincom Smalltalk. I got all this help despite being too lazy to post to the appropriate mailing list or contact Cincom’s technical support. It’s nice to know the product is supported this fervently.
I sent Mr. Robertson my strace, showing VisualWorks doing the mmap() tango indefinitely. However, he had asked for a core file and I realized I didn’t have one. So, I set about creating one for him. I adjusted ulimit and launched VisualWorks…. and it just worked!
The main thing that has changed since the last time I launched it was that Gentoo had an update to glibc, so while I have no concrete evidence (which obviously didn’t prevent me from pointing an accusatory finger in VisualWork’s direction ;-), my prime suspect is some kind of bug in Gentoo’s glibc.
Honestly, I’m just happy to have VisualWorks working on my system, and my general laziness will prevent me from investigating this further. It is snappier and generally more consistent with the rest of my development tools, so it’s much more fun to work with than Squeak.
Don’t get me wrong: I still really like Squeak, and in particular I like how it is open sourced, but Squeak’s UI really annoys the heck out of me, and I really do prefer to have VisualWork’s more efficient runtime. At some point I’ll be annoyed by Cincom not being truly open source, but for now I’m enjoying it tremendously.
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Yeah, I’m impressed too. James Robertson noticed my last post about the csh workaround to make the installer work and posted on his blog with the workaround and saying it’s already fixed in the next release.
I also really like Cincom Smalltalk (or is it VisualWorks? :-)) better than Squeak - feels less childish and much snappier. Incidentally, I wonder when Squeak is going to post the download links for their 3.9 release, which they announced on 2006-09-08… :-)